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SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook's making its Open Graph initiative a little more open.
At an event here, this evening the company announced a crop of 60 new partners that have integrated their applications with Open Graph, as well as promising to approve new applications that make use of it.
The feature lets Facebook developers add real world actions to their applications, taking Facebook's sharing features beyond links and liking items to sharing what exactly that application does. Some of the early demo products that came with that introduction were Spotify, Netflix, and RDIO, with user actions in those apps showing up as "listened" or "watched."
Joining those tonight are some 60 companies including TripAdvisor, Ticketmaster, Digg, Kobo, Zynga, Rotten Tomatoes, and Buzzfeed. The company says these extend into categories Facebook did not originally include in its launch announcement.
"This is just the tip of the iceberg," said Carl Sjogreen, Facebook's director of platform products. "Our vision for Timeline and the application platform is that whatever app you're using, you can add it to your timeline."
The new Open Graph features these apps make use of were first introduced at the company's F8 conference last September, an annual event where the company shares new features aimed at developers.
At F8, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg--who was not in attendance this evening--pitched Open Graph actions as something that could deliver a "frictionless" experience across the Web, and create "a completely new class of social apps than what was ever possible before."
News of the additional Open Graph apps going live tonight were first reported by All Things Digital earlier this week.
Timeline--which is tied to the Open Graph features as it appears on user profiles-- continues to be an opt-in feature for users. It was introduced alongside the latest additions to Open Graph at F8. The feature is a visual and functional redesign of user profiles, putting activity into a page that covers the entirety of someone's use of the site, and third-party services that are connected to Facebook through the Open Graph.
Following F8, Facebook only made Timeline available to developers before beginning to roll it out slowly to users as an opt-in service. Over the weekend the feature became available to all Facebook users worldwide. The company made no mention tonight about if or when it would become the new default view.
Here's a full list of companies that are a part of the launch:
